As Greeks prepare for the beginning of the school year in September, there are serious concerns among Ministry of Education officials that as many as 27,000 teacher and university professor positions will remain unfilled. Officials are scrambling to recruit substitute teachers with fewer certifications to fill classrooms.
The U.S.-Turkey coalition appears already in trouble, even before American F-16s take to the Syrian skies out of Turkey to fly anti-ISIS missions. The Turkish military allegedly only gave Americans ten minutes to leave the site of an imminent airstrike on alleged PKK territory in Iraq.
The U.S Coast Guard announced this week that they have seized more cocaine on the Pacific high seas in the past ten months than in the past three years combined, a total of 32 metric tons of cocaine.
Maria Gabriela Chávez, the most prominent of late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez’s four children, is believed to be the wealthiest person in Venezuela, with a reported net worth nearing $4.2 billion.
The Chinese Ministry of Culture, through state media outlet Xinhua, has published a “blacklist” of 120 songs banned from being played or sold in China for their “obscenity, violence, crime” or potential to “harm social morality.” Anyone caught trafficking in this music will receive “severe punishment,” the government says.
Less than two weeks after imposing a nationwide ban on big game hunting in response to the killing of the famous Cecil the lion, Zimbabwe has already lifted the ban, allowing hunters to continue killing exotic game.
The government of Seoul is promising “pitiless penalty” and “a severe retaliation” against North Korea for the serious injury of two South Korean soldiers at the hands of what appear to be North Korean landmines, which the South Korean government believes were planted by North Koreans infiltrating the other side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
The Turkish government’s anti-terrorism campaign, initially advertised as a campaign to destroy the Islamic State terrorist group, has killed hundreds of members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and left the terror group significantly diminished, as its imprisoned leader calls for peace talks.
A total of over 100 Cuban dissidents were arrested this weekend, with more than 90 being hauled away on a bus by Cuban authorities on Sunday as they marched through Havana wearing masks of President Barack Obama, demanding the White House pressure Cuba to respect human rights and political freedom.
The families of passengers of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stormed the Malaysian embassy in Beijing Friday, objecting to being left out of meetings with Malaysian government officials and demanding Malaysia pay for their flight to Reunion, a remote island in the Indian Ocean where the flaperon part of a Boeing 777 was found this month.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PPK) terrorist group’s leadership has called upon the United States to intervene and encourage the Turkish government to engage in peace talks with the Kurdish group, in the hopes of ending the air campaign Turkey is waging against them while claiming to be fighting the Islamic State (ISIS).
Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government is striving to contain what has grown into a significant drug abuse problem among its population, pushing the limits of both law enforcement and medical care facilities in accommodating criminals and those who need help fighting their addictions.
As Republicans wake up from their first taste of a crowded and extremely accomplished field of 2016 candidates, many will praise the candidates for what will likely be remembered as one of the more substantive and combative debates in recent memory.
The Peruvian Maoist terrorist militia Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”), responsible for the death of 25,000 people in the Peruvian countryside in the 1980s and 1990s, may be on the rise again as government officials warn that hundreds remain enslaved and forced to produce food and child soldiers for the group.
The radical leftist party Podemos (“We Can”) that took Spain by storm last year is suffering major poll losses leading into Spain’s parliamentary elections in November, a new government poll shows, as Spanish observers grow wary of socialism following the decline of the Greek economy.
A new raid on several villages in northern Cameroon by Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram has left at least eight dead and 135 others missing.
The unpopular socialist government of Venezuela has been using an army of thousands of Twitter “bots” to inflate its support network on the social media outlet, the Associated Press reports in an extensive exposé.
The criminal investigation into former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis will involve a cyber-crime law enforcement unit, as Greek officials seek to uncover whether Varoufakis’ “Plan B,” an emergency plan that would have required the government to hack into private taxpayer accounts and switch from the euro to the drachma currency.
The bodies of 13 Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG) soldiers will finally be allowed to return to their families after 10 days held up at the Syrian/Turkish border, Turkish media reports. Despite having died fighting the Islamic State, their alliance with the YPG stains them with ties to the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)– Turkey’s number one enemy.
Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram– now known as the Islamic State West Africa Province– released a new video this week showing off new weapons and graphically depicting the beheading of a Nigerian policeman. The new Boko Haram video’s production value seems to indicate it was produced with help from ISIS, and leader Abubakar Shekau’s absence once again is raising questions.
China is attempting to strongarm the countries forming the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) not to discuss its aggressive expansion of control in the South China Sea, issuing statements arguing that the venue is “improper” for such a topic. The Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore, all who object to China’s expansion, strongly disagree.
Relatives of fallen Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG) fighters in Turkey say the Turkish government is denying permission for the bodies to return to Turkish soil to be buried. A group of 12 bodies, including that of a German national fighting in Syria, have been waiting in a refrigerated truck on the Syrian border for more than one week for permission to enter Turkey.
Despite losing a Supreme Court case in which he argued that pornography is “worse than Hitler,” an Indian lawyer has managed to get the nation’s Department of Telecommunications to block 857 pornographic websites nationwide, sparking an uproar from free speech supporters.
The murder of Cecil, a famous Zimbabwean lion, at the hands of an American dentist on an exotic game hunt has become this summer’s national outrage. Liberals are calling for government intervention to prevent Americans from exotic animal hunting and the mainstream media has carved out hours of time to discuss this injustice.
Socialist Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is blaming a United States conspiracy for a supermarket riot over the weekend that left one 21-year-old man dead–a man witnesses say was shot to death by Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard.
The Turkish government has denied that it has targeted civilians in its airstrikes against the Islamic State and Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Syria and Iraq. Kurdish officials in bot the PKK and Iraqi Kurdistan have condemned the deaths of civilians in Turkish attacks.
Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, is calling for the Marxist terror group the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to leave Iraq completely, as civilians have died in Turkish airstrikes targeting the group. Barzani also condemned Turkish forces for killing civilians in his territory.
The Venezuelan military has invaded and seized a food distribution center in Caracas used by national food and beer corporation Polar, as well as American companies Nestle and Pepsi. 12,000 tons of food, six million liters of soft drinks, and 2,000 jobs are now at risk in a nation suffering major food shortages and a collapsed economy.
The government of Sierra Leone has quarantined 624 people in the past week following the death by Ebola of a man in a town that had not experienced any cases of the deadly virus in months. While the outbreak continues with little natural end in sight, however, scientists have announced a breakthrough vaccine development that could eradicate Ebola for good.
One of the world’s most active volcanos is threatening to derail the nascent investigation of debris that may belong to missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on remote Reunion Island. Investigators have been forced to flee as Le Piton de la Fournaise begins to erupt, covering the search area in ash.
A Turkish national whistleblower known on Twitter only under the alias Fuat Avni is claiming that the Suruç suicide bombing attributed to the Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS) was planned by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to allow for military action against Kurds. While the account is anonymous and provides no corroborating evidence, it has sufficient following to provoke a loud national response.
Philippine Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio announced this week that his court had sufficient evidence to conclude China had destroyed 17 reefs near the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, and had begun work dredging ten other reefs to build artificial islands in international waters.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is currently in Beijing, where he met with President Xi Jinping on Wednesday and called for the expansion of bilateral trade. While Chinese state media attempted to make trade the center of the meeting, the international community watched for signs of tension between the two nations given Turkey’s support of China’s Uyghur minority.
Cecil, a 13-year-old lion that was, for many Zimbabweans, the sole source of pride in an otherwise hellish dictatorship, is dead. His death at the hands of an American dentist has done what the deaths of tens of thousands of Zimbabwean humans have failed to do since Robert Mugabe’s ascendance to head of state: get Americans to care about Zimbabwe.
The Prime Minister of Iraq, Haider al-Abadi, took to Twitter on Tuesday to condemn the Turkish government for participating in a “dangerous escalation” of violence against Kurdish targets in northern Iraq, after announcing they would limit their attacks to creating an “anti-ISIS” zone in the Syrian heartland.
The Islamic State-affiliated terrorist group Boko Haram has killed 29 people this week after raiding two Christian villages in northern Borno State. The attacks occurred as Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is in Cameroon to meet with President Paul Biya regarding a strategy to eliminate the terror syndicate.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) issued a statement in “strong solidarity” with Turkey following that nation’s emergency meeting to address a new anti-terrorism campaign against the Islamic State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has stretched out of Ankara as far as northern Iraq in less than a week.
Venezuela’s socialist government has run the OPEC nation’s economy to the group, prompting shortages of goods as varied as toilet paper, coffin materials, beer, and water. The shortage has now hit pharmacies, with most pharmacies having completely run out of most forms of contraceptives, particularly birth control pills.
A group of Boko Haram fighters has reportedly approached the Nigerian government requesting “peace talks,” hoping to trade in their weapons for some clemency from President Muhammadu Buhari, despite the group’s mass murder of thousands of Nigerians in village raids and suicide bombings.
The Islamist government of Tripoli, one of two competing national governments in Libya, has sentenced Saif al-Gaddafi, son of slain dictator Muammar Gaddafi, to death. Few expect that sentence to be rendered, least of all the rebels that have kept Gaddafi in captivity and fear handing him over to be killed will only result in his escape.
